💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anonymous-barbaric-contribution.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 19:48:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Barbaric contribution Author: Anonymous Date: 31 October 2012 Language: en Topics: anti-technology, Anarchist intervention, Italy Source: Retrieved on May 2013 from http://www.non-fides.fr/?Barbaric-contribution Notes: Contribution to a november 2012 international anarchist meeting in Zurich.
When we try to read the reality that surrounds us we realize that we are
assisting to a development of profound transformations when we look at
the management of economic and political power. Such changes are also
reflected on a social level. It is necessary to confront ourselves with
the current transformations and to take them into consideration in
relation to our analysis and prospective of attack.
Capital is not in crisis, but more ’simply’ the financial choices of the
states have created some difficulties in the traditional management of
the market and have produced, in general, a worsening of conditions of
existence in the life of consumer citizens. The contradictions that
capital has developed have contributed to determine some zones and
occasions of conflict, more or less brutal and of longer or shorter time
span, between the guardians of power and its structures with those
pockets of population that have had enough with being excluded from the
comforts that the fake well-being of societies of consumption have
permitted. Looking at this situation it is natural to ask ourselves what
to do. Being “here and now” is in fact at the basis of our desire of
violent rupture with all systems of values, with capital and its many
variations. Within such reflexions and within the definition of
perspectives that can guide us through uncertain and unexplored paths of
revolt we believe it necessary to avoid confronting ourselves with
reality through eyes silted by easy enthusiasms that risk leading us to
look at insurrections from every angle, accomplices in every occupier,
revolutionary subjects in all exploited. At the same time we believe it
is equally dangerous to remain anchored in a kind of realist pessimism
that risks paralyzing us before the passage of time, of transforming us
into permanently awaiting, trapped in a determinist logic. What we
believe to be fundamental is to place ourselves in an optic of lucid
observation that could allow us to grasp the current transformations,
identifying the aspects which are vulnerable to our enemy, to better aim
towards how and what to attack.
In a mental and material condition that is dominated by the urgency of
being there (and not of being), as a definition of our own role within a
diffused conflictuality, we risk to loose sight of the central point in
question: the necessity of starting from ourselves, from our own
anarchist ideas and perspectives. Then, during a moment of a spontaneous
revolt the problem of anarchists is not that of searchings for a role
among other roles, of finding a way to be accepted by the others, to be
agreeable or to hide our own real desires, just to tie alliances. It
would be a lot more useful to choose conditions of attack that hinder a
return to normality, experimenting in the acts that belong to us,
finding targets that spontaneity alone is not able to find. Any
insurrectional hypothesis is unpredictable and independent from us, but
as anarchists, in a perspective of permanent conflictuality and of
definition of insurrectional projects we can certainly give a
fundamental contribution to what is going on.
The problems that we should confront ourselves with, is not so much how
to relate to the possibilities of revolt in the streets, of territorial
and/or specific struggles that could become radical and widespread, but
more how to continue to act and attack, in both a practical and
theoretical dimension, in the light of the current transformations
within society and the mechanisms of domination.
Analyzing the practices and the paths of struggle in relation to the
objective is the fundamental step of a discussion aimed towards
individuating the limits and the perspectives of the theory and the
practice of social subversion. To be able to better touch on the
different questions and proposals that we intend to put forward on this
occasion, we would like to bring certain argumentations to the attention
of comrades.
We believe an urgent matter to confront the question of the ways of
communication among comrades. The problem can be faced distinguishing
two aspects, that of the ways with which we decide to communicate and
that of the value that we give to the tools that each time we choose to
use. Specifically, we are referring to the use of the internet and the
way we relate to it. Our own use of these tools, even within limits, is
a given fact, however this is certainly not a factor from which we can
consider them useful in the case of an insurrection or a fundamental
tool in the definition of our prospective, or, more, something which we
can dispose of as we please.
The systems of virtual communication have had an enormous developments
within the society we live in over the last twenty years and permeate
every day more in the reality and in the system of relations between
people. We cannot ignore the such systems have slowly entered our lives,
inevitably conditioning also our way of relating with others, with what
surrounds us and with the mediums of communication themselves. All of
this happened in spite of our awareness that virtual irreality is
functional to power and it is its force.
Over the last decade the traditional methods through which our ideas
circulated, such as newspapers, brochures, flyers, poster and books have
been severely reduced and the spreading of ideas has been almost
entirely delegated to the virtual universe. More than ever it is
indispensable to return and brush up the old forms of encounter and
communication between comrades and experiment with new ones, ones that
are only ours and not of the enemy. Returning to meeting each other and
taking the time to do so, something that is more and more difficult
given the daily rhythm imposed by modern life, rhythms that more or less
consciously we have made our own.
It often happens to hear someone making statements around the
possibility of using computerized tools in certain situations, however
finding ourselves face to face with a practically daily use of the
internet, particularly through the exchange of information and ideas,
has shown us how much virtual reality has been able to condition in a
negative way the current way of building relations. The idea of a good
use of the virtual reality in a revolutionary perspective does not
convince us, in fact we think that taking into consideration such a
possibility would entail choosing paths that give no guarantee, given
that they are functional to capital and the management of power.
Computerization and technological development have to perhaps be
potential targets of attack.
The machine of capital is fed by structures of power (bureaucracies and
institutions), by mechanisms of repression and control (prisons,
courthouses, military and police forces, surveillance systems), by work,
by consensus, by production. Radical critique and the perspective of
attack have to therefore develop on many levels, both through theory and
through practice. Specifically the system of production and consumption
is what binds and chains individuals to capital and all its variations.
The creation of false needs determines submission, more or less
conscious, to the exploitation of work, to the logics of economic
colonialism. The production of energy, industrial complexes and more or
less displaced factories, the spreading of merchandise are at the basis
of the functioning of this world.
And it is precisely in this direction that we need to act, without
waiting that this wall of commodification, which is seeping into every
pore of our existences, collapses on top of us, while we are busy
scratching away on the surface and not at its foundation, burring any
future possibility of attack. Gaining, exchanging and spreading
information, practical and theoretical, in regards to the retrieval and
the use of tools and knowledge is one of the aspects that we believe is
indispensable to discuss and develop.
We can ask ourselves questions about how to act and how to attack, but
it is equally important to ask ourselves against what to act and which
targets to take into consideration, aiming towards the initiative rather
than locking ourselves up in a logic answer. What surrounds us is
swarming with places through which capital proliferates. Places that
were born or were transformed over the last decades. We can, briefly,
make an example, with which it is easy to highlight some changes we are
referring to. Let’s think about the difference there is between paper
archives and databases.
In the past the past, burning the documentation of a registry office, of
a workplace, of a large industrial complex could be considered a
concrete destructive action. Today, not. Information and the information
of an archive are preserved in their databases, in minuscule electronic
devices, and run along thousands of kilometres of cables and wires. Is
it not perhaps necessary to take this into account? Is it not perhaps
obvious that the changes of the enemy have been radical and cannot be
ignored, and therefore it is necessary to get to know them better and
deeper? On this occasion we do not want make a list of what could
possibly be considered targets of attack, we prefer leaving these
matters to the imagination of the research and the creativity of one’s
own definition of prospectives of revolt.
An other point that we are interested to briefly discuss is the
international dimension that we believe an insurrectionalist perspective
should assume or return to. Occasions such as this one allow us to meet,
discuss, confront each other with other comrades from different places,
and need to constitute a starting point to the deepening of future
relationships. However the possibility to make these bonds on an
individual basis or among realities from different places should not be
the final end, but an excuse and an aspect within the internationalist
dimension to which we aspire to. Having relations with comrades who live
elsewhere is not enough, it is necessary that each one of us knows how
to project ourselves in an optic of observation and action that goes
beyond territorial boundaries. To explain ourselves better, let’s take
as an example what happened in Greece over the last years, the
insurrection of December, the thousands of attacks spread over its
entire territory, the repeating conflictuality with the police forces as
well as various symbols and structures of power, the looting of
supermarkets and many other actions that have warmed our hearts and
fired our souls. Fires, though, that rarely spilled over our souls to
assume a concrete dimension.
Reasons can be different one from the others. Lack of contacts? A
reality too far removed from our own? Internal conditions hard to
decipher? Sporadic news that often is exclusively linked to sources of
the regime? Of course these are reasons that probably weighed in. But
first among all, the most determining one, was that were were not, and
are not, prepared and therefore incapable of seizing the occasion.
Managing to export from the greek borders a permanent conflictuality and
targeted attacks, being able to understand the contradictions that
capital is developing a bit everywhere, being able to counter-attack
having at our disposal tools developed beforehand, could have made the
difference.
It is also through reflecting on this missed occasion, of which we could
mention many more, that we can understand how much it is necessary to
have the capacity to see beyond the few things that are in our short
range of view and to be ready, to be prepared. In the urgency of wanting
to be there, in the excitement of participation in the possibility of
spreading indignation we run the risk of losing ourselves between the
provocations of capital and the trajectory of roads that don’t belong to
us. We don’t have a world to save, neither consciences to conquest, nor
verbs to spread.
Even though a creativity that also determines the unpredictable is quite
fundamental, the perspectives and the objectives should not be pulled
out of a magic hat, we cannot debase ourselves in an obsessive search
for roles, numbers and head-counts. It is nonetheless important to
explore new paths of attack, explore new means, tools and techniques in
relation not only to objectives, but also tacking into consideration
contexts and available forces.
Infinite possibilities of intervention exist in a critical and
destructive sense against the reality that surrounds us, and in such a
sense we find it important to extend and diversify the practices of
conflict attempting to make them, time after time, reproducible.
Palermo, 31 October.